The Devil's Music (20 page)

    ‘Which reminds me,’ Sarah continues, ‘how’s the rope stuff coming on? Done any more work on that big thing that looks like French knitting on a giant scale?’

    I lean my head back beside hers. ‘The sinnet? Finished it this morning. Today I’m painting and decorating, since I’m supposed to be earning my keep.’

    ‘Your keep?’

    ‘Well, my sister’s more or less feeding me at the moment.’

    ‘Your sister? Her place then, is it?’

    ‘Not exactly.’ I stretch out my legs. Twisting my neck, I roll my skull to and fro on the rendered wall and close my eyes. The sun’s warm and red on my eyelids.

    A pause.

    Sarah’s sucking up her hot chocolate noisily. She wipes her lips. ‘That place has been empty a long, long time. Only the occasional mysterious visitor for a few days, then nothing but the odd-job man for months at a time.’

    ‘Yeah.’ I take my hand from her leg to pick up a stone and aim it at an old lobster pot collapsed on the pebbles. Perhaps Father was the mysterious visitor, though it seems unlikely. I chuck another stone at the lobster pot.

    Sarah sighs.

    ‘OK, mate, I get it. No Entry.’

    I select another, smaller, stone. Weigh it up. Throw it.

    Sarah unzips her boots. They thud on to the wooden decking. She stretches and wriggles her toes about, humming something familiar:
What shall we do with the drunken sailor?
She draws my attention like a magnet.

    ‘What got you started on the rope?’ she asks, after a few minutes.

    I look at her in surprise. No one has asked me this, the right question, before. It’s a shock.

    ‘In general, or this time specifically?’

    It’s a sort of test for her.

    Sarah’s focused on picking nail varnish from her toenails. ‘Oh I think in general, don’t you?’

    She’s passed.

    ‘My grandfather was a rope maker. He taught me about knots.’ The hot chocolate brought him to mind and now he’s here, in his rolled shirt sleeves and braces, making the
sss sss
noise of concentration between his teeth as he steps out into the daylight.

    ‘A rope maker!’ She stops picking her nails and screws up her forehead. ‘I don’t even know what rope is made from.’

    ‘All sorts of things, these days, but it used to be mainly hemp.’

    ‘Wow! Hemp? You mean like cannabis?’

    ‘Yeah, hemp is
Cannabis sativa
; the strongest natural fibre.’

    ‘Well, bloody hell!’ Sarah goes back to picking nail varnish from her big toenail. ‘Don’t stop. I’m listening.’ Her hands are lined and dry. She brushes them together, draws her bare feet up beneath her, and snuggles up. ‘C’mon. Put your arm round me and tell me the story of rope; of you and your grandfather and rope.’

    I put an arm around her shoulders, knocking her hair by mistake so that several looped sections fall down around her face. There are kinks and waves, tightening into corkscrews at the ends; blonde and grey hairs mixed in with the brown. I lift a strand. It smells of cigarette smoke and, somehow, sex. A pulse throbs at her neck, just below the ear.

    She elbows me in the ribs. ‘C’mon. Talk. Begin at the beginning.’

    I unravel her hair bit by bit, winding the curls around my fingers, watching them unwind again and, as I sit in the warm November sun, it’s easy to talk about Grandfather – about the cardboard boxes filled with lengths of different ropes that were kept in his hallway with its yellow light, his ‘walking the world’ stories.

    ‘Why did he say that then, that he’d walked the world?’

    ‘Because of the distance rope makers walked. Up and down the rope walk, every day. Someone calculated that, during a lifetime of rope-making, rope makers walked the equivalent of the circumference of the world.’

    The way she listens, her total absorption, makes me want to keep on talking. I tell her about the first ball of string Grandfather gave me. It came in a brown paper bag that smelled of the hardware store. I was about four. I had to stretch my hand wide around the ball of string to examine the overlapping whorls, the way they criss-crossed, deeper and deeper, into the empty core of the ball.

    ‘Have you ever looked properly at a ball of string?’

    She shakes her head. ‘Never, but I will now.’

    I try to describe it to Sarah, the excitement of going faster and faster round Grandfather’s front room, putting string high up round the door handle, round the hook on the fireplace where the fire bellows hung, low down, round the bottom of the standard lamp, the feet of the piano stool. By the time I’d finished everything was joined by the lines of string criss-crossing the room.

    Sarah’s eyes are closed now, her breathing regular. Perhaps she’s asleep. She opens one eye and says, ‘I can see it, that room. Don’t stop yet.’

    But the sun is disappearing behind the purplish-grey clouds clumped on the horizon and the air’s becoming cool. I’ve been talking a long time. I’m hungry.

    ‘I’ll cook you fried egg and bacon.’ She reads my mind. ‘If you tell me one more story.’

    So, because she’s asked and because she seems interested in the cannabis connection with rope, I describe the way they used to collect momeea, many years ago. About the hot season that came after the high snows and before the monsoon rain. Young boys ran naked through the cannabis stems and leaves until they fell exhausted among bruised plants. The natives would stroke the momeea from the limbs and torsos of the naked boys and knead it into balls between their palms.

    ‘Momeea,’ she says. ‘What a wonderful word!’

    I stand up, dizzy with words and hunger and lack of sleep. ‘Momeea, churrus, sidhee, bangh, gunjah, hashish.’ I stretch and roll the sounds. Sarah stands too, pretending to stir a huge cauldron. We chant the words together until a woman walks by with a golden retriever and swiftly turns her gaze from our antics.

    We fall against each other in laughter.

    Then, because I’m on a roll, I tell her about the doctor in Calcutta in Grandfather’s time who experimented with majoon and tincture of hemp to treat convulsive disorders like tetanus and rabies.

    ‘Cannabis to treat rabies? Sort of makes sense when you think they use it for multiple sclerosis.’ She’s looking up at the sky. ‘Scary disease, rabies. The fear of water – where does that come from?’

    I don’t know the answer to this.

    ‘The French call it “La Rage”, don’t they? They used to chain people up – grisly.’ Her face lights up with a smile. ‘OK. Let’s do it.’

    ‘What?’

    ‘First tango lesson.’

    ‘Now?’ I’m drained from talking.

    ‘Here is ideal. Take off your shoes. Close your eyes. We’re going to walk, and you’re going to keep your eyes closed. No cheating. The most basic tango pattern is
la Caminata
, the Walk.’ She slips her arm around my waist. ‘Feel the clues you get from my movements. I’m not going to say anything.’

    The tide is high, halfway up the shingle banks, so I can relax: no wet sand. I close my eyes. We wander together over the shingle, me with eyes closed and faltering steps, body tensed to guess when to step up or down, when to move to left or right. She doesn’t say anything to me except, ‘Relax,’ which she says quite often.

    Gradually, a space opens up inside my head. My soles burn less and instead my body grows acutely aware of the varying sizes of pebbles beneath the arch of my foot, the slope of the shingle bank, the salt air on my lips, the sound of the waves – a constant presence – and the pressure of her hand, elbow, thigh against my body. Eventually level concrete is rough underfoot again. We come to a halt. I blink in the shadowless light.

    ‘We need food,’ Sarah says.

    In the kitchen, she puts on music she calls ‘techno tango’. As she cooks, holding her head high, back straight and breasts out, she tells me about Buenos Aires and immigrants who composed the original tango music. Every now and then she flips one long leg up and around the other, a quick flash of movement, fluid from the knee.

    I sit at the table and watch her. ‘Are there steps?’ I say, thinking of the onetwothree, onetwothree of a waltz.

    But Sarah shakes her head and gesticulates with one hand, chasing the eggs round the frying pan with a spatula in the other. ‘Some of the steps are the same as other walking dances, like the quickstep, but tango dancers relate to their partners very differently. You touch throughout – and it should be an emotional connection, as well as physical. We talk about
el alma del tango
– the soul of tango.’

    Her words, the concepts behind them, don’t sink in. The kitchen is cosy and my face is glowing from being outside. I try to remember whether or not I slept last night. I stifle a yawn as she’s scooting the bacon and tomatoes on to two plates. She stops mid-sentence.

    ‘I am interested,’ I say, hurriedly, ‘just tired.’

    ‘Mmmm ... You an insomniac or something?’ She sits down opposite.

    I shrug.

    ‘Well, I’ll bore you with tango another time. It’s my passion, I guess. Eat.’

    I’m too weary to query her and only when she’s chucked me out because I’m fidgeting and she wants to sleep, do I wonder what place sculpture has in her life, if tango is her passion.

    There’s a half-empty bottle on the kitchen table. It’s dark outside. The kitchen smells of wet paint. A woman I went out with briefly, years ago, was a professor, something to do with anatomy. I had a cleaning job at the university where she taught. She had big tits, looked good in a white coat and was into playing games, sex in uncomfortable places. Once she smuggled me into her laboratory, which smelt of gas and formaldehyde. She pretended I was a student. There was a soft hum from the fluorescent lights and the brush of starched fabric as the real students in their white coats bent over the wooden dissection bench. They were scraping tissue away from the undersurface of the cerebellum, near the stem of the brain, to reveal a knot of fibres, made of nerve cells. It was the size of a fingernail.

    ‘That’s the amygdala,’ my girlfriend announced to the students, tapping the almond-shaped knot with the tip of her scalpel blade. ‘It processes fear, houses memories of fear. And anger, we think.’

    She described the appearance of inclusion bodies in the amygdala of patients with rabies, a discovery that first led to the connection of fear with anger.

    ‘In rabies, the regulator for fear is turned up and up – but we don’t know much about it, nor why fear seems to be indelible.’ She detailed the neural wiring of the amygdala, explaining its complex connections to the senses. As she spoke I heard rain, smelt shoe polish, felt small round holes pressed against my fingertips: a bundle of nerves.

He is in the box room. He is taking Jelly’s cot to pieces. They have been arguing in the kitchen. She has gone into the garden.

    A scraping on the landing. He is moving the piece of wood that covers the hatch into the attic. He carries a side piece of Jelly’s cot up the stepladder. The attic light bulb shines on cobwebs like witches’ hair. When his legs come down out of the attic, I run and bite his leg as hard as I can. My mouth is stuffed full with material, choking. The ladder wobbles. His foot lashes out.

    ‘For pity’s sake, Andrew, stop behaving like an imbecile.’

    He nearly falls down the ladder. He picks me up. I swing my legs and kick him. He smacks my face, hard, so that my teeth clunk. There is blood in my mouth. My cheek burns.

in the dark

I told Hugh and Stephen about Jelly when we were swapping marbles. Stephen said it was all for the best because Elaine was a Spasbo. I punched his nose. Stephen kept saying but she is she is Andy she is a spaz and I punched Stephen every time he said it again and again until Stephen’s nose dripped blood all over his poxy yellow aertex shirt where Stephen’s poxy initials were embroidered in poxy cross-stitch.

In the cupboard under the stairs I press the pads of my fingertips over the woodworm holes and wonder what else is in the dark, on the other side of the small dark circles.